>I honestly do not mean any offence, just out of curiosity. >If you guys care about money and time why would you spend the best years of >your life basically copying commercial products for free?
1) For the same reasons commercial vendors build competing products: different tools in the same category fit different scenarios 2) The right-tool-for-the-job concept: Sometimes a commercial solution is the right choice, sometime an open-source solution is. Budgets, applicability, and local expertise all should factor into platform selection decision. 3) Because sometimes the output of a platform is more important than the platform itself: If your role is to work with data, not to produce software, it can in the end be more efficient in the end to have a platform you can modify as needed.
